hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
by impracticality
Summary: • you talk too much—dan&gus. •


**||hippopotomonstr osesquippedalio phobia**

**||notes :: (vague, hinted-at) Dan x Gus for KadiToka-Chii~ ...Sorry for the overall fail D: (and I said/put it under humor/angst genre but I honestly don't know what genre to call this, lol)**

**Vexos!Mira timeline. Let's switch AceShunMarucho for Dan and weirdaliengoo for prison cells, okay~?**

**Oh also: the summary is from the lurvely song 'Curse of Curves.' Go listen to ittt. The singer isn't my favorite but the lyrics are smex. I think I might have also used one of their lines in 'diamond dust' or 'forever and you're gone'...and yeah~**

-x-

Day twelve, sunny - he thinks. Dusty paleness filters through the iron-barred window opposite the door's, and if it isn't the sun, it's death come knocking too early.

He writes two syllables on the wall in the ink that wells beneath his skin, recording what he can't see, and wonders if the drafty room will ever allow warm luminance within its metallic-encased silence. But light is blotted out here; over time even he'd succumbed to smothering darkness. And he's forgotten how to read words that are penned in fervency.

"I wonder, are you really as unintelligent as you act? Or are they wrong about you?"

He looks to the door. He can't even bring himself to be surprised these days, anymore, not really. But he scowls anyway, leans his head back against the cold metal of the wall, props his legs up like he isn't so tired he could let himself die if only to sleep without nightmares. He's so very tired that each breath is an aberrance, and when he closes his eyes he sees dead bones walking before unconsciousness has even overtaken him.

Maybe they are not wrong, after all.

"Say something."

So he says nothing.

-x-

She is by his side and smiling like he's never seen her smile, tears running down her face in rainwater rivulets. "You," she whispers, scarcely daring to breathe, skeletal hands reaching through the bars as if she's afraid he'll disappear again. "You're okay."

He flinches, twisting away from spindly fingers, and feels nothing at the flash of hurt that dances across bright eyes. But she does not ask, and he does not answer. They leave it at that.

-x-

The cell is not so cold today as it is usually. He sees that girl pass by, the girl who's face he can't remember (if only because she was immersed in shadows cast too long), the girl who cried for him - why? He can't even conjure up her name.

She glances at him for a moment, hesitates mid-step, and keeps walking. He wishes her well; it takes a strange brokeness to come here of your own free will.

"Can I…"

She stops, unsure gaze finding him again, and does not speak. He waits for orders, angry and staccato, tumbling from her lips without restraint. He waits for her to demand him to continue. Then he sees her eyes so blue, and remembers her lack of harsh acid-lined hatred.

"I'm trying to -" He stops abruptly, blinks, as if his train of thought has just been derailed. "Ask you if -"

"Nonsensical words that seem to be trying to make a statement, but fail to do so." His eyes slide shut as he turns towards the door, scathing voice enveloping dead conscience. "How unfortunate."

"Really…" The nameless girl's forehead creases in vexation and she spins on her heels, somehow still spellbound. "Can't you just leave him be?"

She is pointedly ignored. He leans away from them, shoulder blades jutting out against soulless silver as two pairs of eyes trace his slumped profile.

"Say something."

She waits, breath bated, and he scowls in what he hopes is hatred.

"No."

-x-

The pills are too bitter to swallow, and since the first time - when the placebo aftertaste lingered on his tongue- he shudders at the vileness of it all, of washing down candy-lacquered death sentiments that are prolonging his miserable metal-confined minutes with a glass of chlorinated water.

The wall tells him it has been fifteen days. He is dreaming now, while his stomach eats itself from the inside out.

"Listen," the voice is impatient today, and he's almost startled when there is a pang of metal on metal and the smooth glide of a keycard as the great trap-door glides. A sillhouette is painted with color.

He matches a sharp voice to soft angles, blood red to light blue, and fierce words to delicately curved lips.

And then there's a hand fisted in his hair, nails drawing blood along the lines of his bone structure, and an elbow jammed into his ribcage (but that's not the reason he can't breathe).

"I said _listen_, " the voice, the green-eyed monster, hisses. "You may have accepted being isolated here and rotting into nothingness, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to die." Which meant, of course, that the monster won't let death steal him. It is clear that here is the catalyst, but there will be no reaction, no escalation of colliding energies.

His eyes are half shut when the grasp on his chin jerks his still gaze to the tray, and the bright little ellipses resting cheerily on its surface.

"They can't save you if there's no one to save. Was all their preaching that inconsequential?" Silence from him is unsettling even after weeks have gone by, and gloved hands pull at tousled chai, shoving him towards the smiling pills.

"_Say something._"

With a defiance he'd thought he'd lost, the tray is sent clattering to the floor with a jerk of his arm, and eloquence flees from the back of his mind.

"Fuck you."

-x-

On the twenty-first day she asks the question.

"Why don't you talk anymore?"

He doesn't feel like he's sitting in a tomb today, so he works up enough uncaring to shrug.

She glances around hesitantly, skirting towards the barred door, delicate hands encircling around the cool steel bars. "What's happened to you?" She asks quietly, voice carefully even, "You used to be so loud and bold and rash and _stupid _-"

He coughs.

"Stupid_, _but you were…You didn't talk in fragments, and I could hear you without straining my ears."

"I ain't that person anymore." The sound of his own voice is unfamiliar to him.

Her lips quirk hopelessly and she remembers something close to happiness. "I know. But I liked you that way."

"You have bad taste." Jealousy and unrequited hatred bid her goodbye and she flees with unwilling footsteps, glancing over her shoulder. The door slams open, ricocheting off the adjourning wall with whitewashed echoes. She is long gone now, and the chin-upped ghost regards him scornfully. "So, you answer to the one who betrayed you - it's her fault you're here, you know - but you don't answer to the one who holds your pathetic life in their hands?"

There are no pills and there haven't been for the better part of a week. Pale hands find his upper arm, pushing away torn fabric to expose scars without bandages. He does not resist when the business end of the needle meets his skin, and colorless fluid drains away while unspoken words pass between them.

"Still, you have nothing to say?"

The needle flashes as he twirls it deftly, and the liquid life source runs red with all the things he could never rationalize. The light in-between the bars is very, very bright all of a sudden, and green eyes find his, widened incredulously.

"And now," he says, voice rough with rawness, "Neither do you."


End file.
